40. How to Study from a Textbook, and Increasing Study Motivation (Q&A)
Episode 40
In this Q&A episode, I answer two questions submitted by Learn and Work Smarter listeners.
Remember: Other people often ask questions that we ourselves don’t even know we need the answers to – so this episode is absolutely for you!
Question 1: Submitted by a student asking about the best approach to completing assigned textbook readings (in a way that they actually learn the material as they’re reading it).
Question 2: Submitted by a listener taking a professional course, struggling with motivation and looking for ways to make the experience more enjoyable.
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned
Episode 7 → How to Learn Things
Episode 8 → Motivation vs. Discipline: Which One Matters More?
Episode 20 → What is Active Recall and How to Use it to Study
10 Ways to Use Flashcards to Study (video)
✏️ FREE DOWNLOADS:
→ Daily Timeblock Planner (pdf)
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
40 September 2024 Q&A===
[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to episode 40 of the learn and work smarter podcast. This is one of our monthly Q and A episodes where I answer questions submitted by listeners. And that is you. If you are wondering how to submit a question on your own, there is a form on the homepage of learnandworksmarter.com Submit your question there.And I will answer it on an upcoming, monthly, Q and A episode. We the learn and work smarter podcast. This is one of our monthly Q and A episodes where I answer questions submitted by listeners. And that is you. If you are wondering how to submit a question on your own, there is a form on the homepage of learnandworksmarter.com. Submit your question there and I will answer it on an upcoming monthly Q and a episode.
We have two great questions today. One is from a student and the other is from a working professional taking a professional course.
[00:01:00] I'm going to jump right in with the first question and I am going to read it. They write: how do you space out your study sessions for one course? In college were assigned to read one chapter a week, but the topic has lots of sub topics to learn. How would you schedule your time to study each chapter and when it's time for the midterm? I'm a student majoring in accounting and would love to know how to manage my task management.Thank you.
All right. This is a great question because it gives me the opportunity to talk about something that I don't think we talk about enough. And that is the difference between reading and learning. [00:02:00] Now the good thing is that the very fact that you are asking this question the way that you did indicates to me that you know there's a difference between reading and learning. And so you are already ahead of many people. So, let me explain what I mean here.
If your goal was just to read the chapter, okay, and you're asking me how to space out your study sessions for reading the chapter, I would just say something like take however many pages are in the chapter and divide by six days. Right? Cause you don't want to finish two seconds before the class. That would essentially tell you how many pages to read per day before your next class, right?
Or you could do something like read for 40 minutes a day until the chapter is complete. I mean, honestly, if that were your question, which is not, I'll get there, we're just talking about how many minutes does it take? You take you to read a page of your tax book, right? But that is not what you're asking me.
And it's good that you're not asking [00:03:00] me that. Because you see, it means that you're understanding that the point of reading your textbook chapters is actually to learn the information from that chapter. And as I said a minute ago, reading is different from learning. Learning takes longer than reading and it takes more like crunchy, sticky effort.
So, if I were to rephrase your question to anyone, who's trying to understand the difference between reading and learning, it would be something like, how should I space out my study sessions over the course of a week, so I can read my textbook and learn what the material is, or what the textbook chapters are about at the same time. And that my friend has a great question.
So there are a few different ways that you could do this.
Remember learning involves spaced repetition. Which means that you do not want to be reading your textbook in one sitting. Because, although you could technically do that. [00:04:00] Okay. That doesn't use, use spaced repetition to help you learn what is in that textbook. If you are unfamiliar with spaced repetition, I want you to go back and listen to episode seven.
All right. How to learn things. In that episode, I teach you about space repetition and how to use it to study and why you kind of have to all right. That link will be in the show notes. It'll also be in the description box if you are watching this on the learn and work smarter YouTube channel.
So here's what I suggest.
I'm going to give you two different options here.
Okay. And you can either go with one or the other, or maybe you can sort of like combine the two and use them as a framework for creating something that works for your unique situation, but I'm giving you these two options so that you can understand the framework of reading and studying a textbook chapter over the course of a week in the way that you learn it.
All right. So. Let's say that hypothetically, your textbook chapter [00:05:00] has 12 sections. Maybe it has more, maybe it has less, but for this example, let's just say it has sort of like 12 subtopics. You could spend one session on day one, reading and taking notes on sections one, two and three.
Remember, you're not just reading it passively, but you are taking notes as you read.
This means that you are reading maybe a paragraph at a time. Looking away from your textbook, trying to rephrase or summarize when you just ride without looking back at the text, if you, if you can't do that, then you go back and you reread that paragraph. You're pulling out key terms and concepts, right.
And you're taking notes on them. Two-column notes are a really great format for taking notes from textbooks. After it's all said and done, hypothetically right. Reading and taking good thorough notes on sections one, two, and three might take you anywhere from half an hour to an hour. All right. And I would call that study session.
Number one. Now study [00:06:00] session number two, remember the goal here is not just to complete the task. If the goal were just to read the textbook, you could technically do it in one setting if you had that level of concentration. Right. But we want to learn the information that we are reading.
And that is why I suggest stopping after reading and taking notes on just a few sections at a time. Okay. Back to study session two. That would ideally be on the next day. Now again, remember the goal is to learn what you're reading about. And so this is where we want to bring in active recall. I also teach you how to use active recall in episode 20.
Okay. And in that episode, I share several examples of using active recall study methods. But anyway, that's relevant. I'm going to, you'll see why I'm bringing that up. Back to study session number two. Before you jump in and read sections, let's say four five and six, I want you to [00:07:00] review the material from study session number one, all right? So this is where we go from just reading and task completion to actually learning the material.
So, whatever you took notes on on day one- your notes on sections one, two, and three- that material is starting to fade from your mind because it's been something like 24 hours.
Okay. Perfect. That is totally normal. So what you would do at the beginning of study session number two is to test yourself on the material from the day before. If you were taking two column notes, you could simply cover the information in the right column and test yourself and see if you can recall the information just by looking at the trigger cues and the words and the concepts that you wrote in the left-hand column.
Okay. You could also start by making flashcards from the notes that you took the day before. Why would you do that? This, because [00:08:00] this initiates the study process. Because not only are you reviewing what you wrote the day before, but you're actually writing it again on a note card. And you'll do this for 15 minutes, nothing crazy.
15 minutes, reviewing your notes from the previous day. And now it's time to read and take notes on the next I'd say like three sections. Okay. So section 4, 5, 6. And maybe that takes you anywhere from 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour, max. So we're talking maybe somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour total. If you combine the 15 minutes of reviewing your notes from the day before or making, you know, active recall study materials like flashcards and then reading and taking notes on the new material.
You can probably guess where I'm going with this, but study session three would be on the next day. And what are we going to begin study session three with? Absolutely reviewing the notes from days one and two.
Now, if you [00:09:00] made flashcards, for example, from day one's notes, You could test yourself using those flashcards, just like a quick run-through. Nothing bananas. And then you can make flashcards for the notes you took on day two, as a way to revisit that information and reignite the learning process from the day before. But you see the underlying principle of spaced repetition is at play here. You're spacing out your reading and your study sessions and beginning each study session with a review of the material that you've been learning on the days before. And I think in my hypothetical example, we were saying that your textbook chapter had like 12 sections.
Okay. So you would do study session- what are we on, four?. We'd do study session four and then five, however many you need to complete the textbook reading. Always allowing like 24 hours in between your study sessions so that you can tap into the magic of spaced repetition. And of course, beginning each study session with active recall.
Now, I said I was [00:10:00] going to give you two different alternatives. So that was one. Another option would be to front-load all of the reading and note-taking in fewer but longer chunks of time. So maybe like one or two days.
So depending on how long your chapter is and how long you can focus for, maybe you can read and take notes on the entire chapter in two, one hour sessions, either one session in the morning and one in the afternoon, or maybe one session on one day followed, maybe like another 90 minutes on the following day.
What's happening here though, is we are reading and taking good notes on what we're reading and you know, by good notes , I mean, you're, you're not just writing down word for word from the textbook, but you're checking your comprehension by reading a little bit at a time, looking away from the textbook. Actually asking yourself to sort of summarize or paraphrase what you just read and then put that version, your own words into your notes. You're pulling out key terms and ideas and concepts, probably using a two [00:11:00] column note taking method. And if you do this, we still need to get you using active, recall and space repetition if the true goal is for you to learn the material from the textbook, which it is. So, how do we do that? All right.
So after you have read and taken all of your notes on the whole chapter, maybe over the course of like one or two days, Now you begin making your study resources and testing yourself using active recall. Using space repetition, right, by waiting at least a day in between these study sessions. So, hold on, let me backtrack and simplify this. You are assigned to textbook reading on Monday, right at the full chapter. That day after class you read, let's say half of the chapter and you take good quality notes on half the chapter. The next day, day two, you read the second half of the chapter taking really good quality notes on that. On day three, you review your notes, making [00:12:00] sure they are complete and they make sense to you. And you begin making flashcards from your notes. You're not studying the flashcards yet on day three, you are just making the flashcards. Okay.
On day four you start using your flashcards to study. On my you a YouTube channel for school habits and my school habits, YouTube channel. I have a video called 10 different ways to study with flashcards. And I think that'll be really helpful. I will leave that link in the show notes and in the description box, in that video, I go over a few unique and honestly, freely effective ways to use flashcards, um, like index cards. And that's what I'm suggesting you do during the remaining study sessions.
So the next day, I think we're on study session five. Okay. You're going to go through your flashcards again, Many of them, you will forget from the day before, but that is okay. That is the nature of active recall. That's how it works. The whole idea [00:13:00] is that you returned to the material when it's about to fade from your working memory. That is how we strengthen those neural networks.
Okay. Then on day six, almost there, you run through your flashcards one final time. This may take like 15, 20 minutes or so because the material is getting a lot more familiar to you at this point. Cause you're touching it every single day. So that was day six, two days spent reading and taking notes. Several days making your study materials from your notes. And studying those study materials. And essentially you would either follow this method or the first alternative that I shared with you for every chapter that you get.
Now, some of you listening to this might be thinking that is a lot of work, katie. I could literally just read the chapter and take some basic notes in like an hour. But listen. You have to focus on what the goal is. Is your goal to just [00:14:00] earn a check mark for filling up your notebook with random notes that you don't even understand because you copied from the textbook word from word, right. Then by all means forget the advice I just gave you. Do what you want.
That would make me sad. And that would make you a really ineffective student. But your goal is to learn the material. And I know that's your goal because of the way you asked the question. So choose one of these sunny methods or some reasonable combination of the two.
And let me return to something else that you asked as part of your question you asked about studying for midterms.
I'm glad you asked that.
So this is actually where the magic happens. This is where all the like discrete and concrete and particular, little set, particular little study advice that I share culminates in something awesome. Here it is. When you put in the effort to learn the material gradually each week, over the course of a semester, by taking thoughtful notes and reviewing your notes and your study materials [00:15:00] regularly, every day or every few days, you'll hardly have to study for your midterm. I need you to hear that if you have zoned out at all on me right now, zoom back in rewind a few seconds so you can hear that again. The most direct way to reduce your study time. Your study effort and your stress for midterms and finals or just exams in general. Is to learn the material as you go.
My students and clients who are the most stressed out for their exams are the ones who do not put in the effort to learn the content gradually. They're taking notes without, you know, understanding what they're even writing down. They're reading their textbooks, reading their textbooks, air quotes, without even checking for their comprehension.
They're maybe not even reading them at all because technically this is what they tell me. They're like, well, no one, no one's checking. Like the teacher doesn't know. Missing the entire point. Okay. That approach never works. And it always leads to total chaos for a midterm or a final
that my friend and the fact that [00:16:00] you asked this question, the way that you asked it tells me that you are on the right track and you know the value of a gradual approach to your study sessions. A little bit each day. Constantly circling back to the material you learned on the days before. That way you walk into your midterm, truly knowing the material.
Okay, we're going to move on to our second question, which is from a working professional, taking a professional course..
And I'm going to read the question.
They write:. As a student of a professional course, how can I manage to keep studies interesting, engaging and fun, especially after facing multiple failures due to which I have to read the same content over and over again. Also, this has started to hamper my focus because I have my exams in November and I don't feel like studying. Okay.
Thank you for asking this question.
What I really hear you saying is you're asking me, how do I stay motivated to focus on my studies when I have experienced [00:17:00] failure and I'm feeling defeated. And that is a tough question because it deals with the concept of motivation and motivation is tricky. I cover motivation versus discipline in episode eight.
And if you haven't listened to that, I really encourage you to start there. In that episode, episode eight, I emphasize the difference between motivation and discipline. And I make the point that at the end of the day, motivation is simply an emotion. Okay. And we can't make ourselves feel any emotion. On demand just as it's really hard to tell any emotion we're feeling to leave on demand.
In other words, we cannot rely on motivation to get us through the tasks that we are uninspired to our approach. And that is where discipline comes in.
But your question is a little bit different because you're telling me that you have experienced failure and defeat. And so it sounds to me like there might be a [00:18:00] little voice in the back of your mind that's telling you, you're just going to fail again. So, what is the point? And if my assessment is true at all, then you're up against a pretty big hurdle. Okay. Um, mentally. I understand that experiencing failure can kill your motivation. But just because you've experienced failure before is absolutely not a guarantee that you're going to have that same failure again.
Give yourself some credit that you are able to learn something from your previous failures that is going to make this time around different. Even if you don't truly believe that you've got to start using that narrative. Because I can give you all of the motivation strategies in the world, but none of them are going to work unless you truly believe that you can do it. Okay. That was my little pep talk.
It is out of the way.
And now I'm going to share a few tips that might [00:19:00] be helpful and make your study sessions or time spent learning more engaging. My first suggestion and it is a big one because it's powerful, and it is to add novelty. Novelty is a primary ingredient from motivation. So is urgency. Novelty means newness.
So any element of anything that is new that you can add to your study experience has the potential to increase your motivation. I am going to pause here to emphasize to everybody the reason why this matters. Okay. Because when we are motivated, We have a greater ability to attend. Attend= pay attention, right? What do I mean by that when we are motivated to do a task or we are motivated by a subject our brain answers that with a beautiful cognitive cocktail of neurochemicals related to [00:20:00] attention. And we are quite literally unable to learn if we cannot attend to what we're learning.
Whether that swore professor in front of the front of a classroom, an online training video related to a professional course. Back to novelty. How can we add novelty to your learning sessions? Um, you could start by going somewhere different, right? If, if your courses online, if you have a laptop, take your course to a public library that you have never been before and bring your headphones.
All right. Go to a bookstore that has seating somewhere in the corner and take your online class there. Obviously that only works if you're taking an online course. Okay. What's your question did not specify, but if your course is online, simply going to a new location you haven't been to before, can supercharge your motivation through novelty. And the trick here is to actually make this a big deal. Make it a big deal to yourself. Google local public libraries that are near you.
See if they have a [00:21:00] study room that you can reserve an advance because now that's some accountability because you have technically an appointment, right. And you can't like blow your appointment. If you're going to a bookstore to work, get excited about the cafe that they have there. Tell yourself, you know, to get there when the bookstore opens early so that you can grab the spot in the seat that's the most comfortable away from the most chaos.
Another suggestion I have is body doubling. I've mentioned this several times on the podcast, but body doubling is a great way to increase motivation and it can be really helpful for people with ADHD. And people without ADHD. Body doubling it's when you work alongside somebody else in the same environment. You're doing your work. They're doing their work, but you're both doing something that's similar in nature. So in your case, Intellectual. Now, the reason body doubling works so well is that you are picking up on the energy of the other person in the room.
And if they are focused, you interpret that energy and it [00:22:00] increases your focus. Also social rules come into play here too. Like if your buddy is head down and focused on their work, you don't want to interrupt them. That would be weird. Right. So what else are you going to do besides, you know, work on your work as well?
Another strategy to increase your enjoyment might be in the tools that you're using. This is partially related to novelty, because as much as I don't want to say go out and buy like a new notebook or anything, if you have the means to do so, and you can invest in a notebook with paper that maybe has a more luxurious feel to it, that might be just a little bit of novelty that's required to bump up your motivation.
Or do you have a notebook lying around the house that you could use that you haven't considered before? Can you swap materials with a, with a friend?
Another tip to increase motivation is to add clarity to what you are doing.
In other words, Make a plan and get really excited about it. Okay. Make it official, sit down with a calendar, map out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. [00:23:00] So what are you going to do on Monday? What are you going to do on Tuesday and where are you going to do it? Make it real, pump yourself up.
Tell somebody about it, print it out, hang it up somewhere. Make it a big deal. If you just have this vague idea of I'm going to take my class this week. I w what does that even mean? Right. Like motivation requires clarity. Like an engine requires fuel, right? And if you make a new study plan for yourself, you're adding both novelty and clarity. And that is honestly the ultimate cocktail for motivation.
And then finally as cheesy as I know this sounds, I know it sound so cheesy.
Should I even say it yet? I'm going to say it. I really want you to try to figure out and focus on your, why. Okay. And just hone in on that. Why are you taking this professional course? Right. I'm assuming it's because you want to develop some kind of content, knowledge or skill [00:24:00] in a particular area so that you become better and more valuable at your job.
Am I right? And that's a pretty powerful motivator right there. When we have a reason for doing what we're doing, when we have a reason for showing up to this professional course and you know that the payoff isn't right now, but it's going to be down the road in a big way, then you've got to use that kind of thinking to power through. The course might be hard.
It may be the most boring thing you've ever taken. But where you're going to be on the other side of that course is going to make the journey worth it. You're going to come out smarter. And more skilled. And more confident. And that is what I want you to focus on when you feel like quitting all together.
All right, my friends. That is the end of today's episode. Thank you for listening. Don't forget to follow the show or subscribe to the learn and work smarter YouTube channel if you're into watching the video version of this. You can find [00:25:00] me on Instagram @schoolhabits and remember, never stop learning.
